Detailing tiny dolls

Introduction:

Detailing tiny dolls can be really difficult. But, that's no excuse to leave out all details! In this tutorial I will show you a few quick and dirty tricks to paint details on really small dolls.

Please note that this isn't a full doll tutorial, though. I'll assume that you're already familiar with doll making and I'm only going to show you how to add extra details.
There's also not a whole lot of text in this tutorial, because for the most part, I think the pictures speak for themselves.

We'll start with a very basic doll on my Kawaii base.

Cute? Yes... but it's a bit boring, isn't it? Let's see what we can do to spice it up!

Step 1: Detailing the top

One of the easiest ways to add detail is by adding seams to the clothing. You can paint them with some simple lines in the outline color.
If you then put some sharp highlights near the seams, they'll stand out more and you'll get a leathery look!

Instead of adding seams, you can also add a zipper. You can make a really small zipper by painting a row of pixels, alternating between a lighter and a darker color. In this case, I used two shades of gray to get a silvery look.

If you paint a darker line on either side of the zipper, it stands out more.

Lastly, you can experiment with dots, stripes, small patterns and trims!

Step 2: Detailing the pants

The techniques we used for the top can also be applied to the pants.

Adding seams and extra highlights:

Adding dots, stripes, patterns and trims:

Step 3: Accessories

The final and most important step is to paint accessories and other small extras. You can add jewelry, studs, a belt, a purse, hair clips, thick soles to the shoes... anything you like!
Also, you can paint in details like loose wisps of hair, holes in clothing and stuff.

One thing to remember when painting these small items is that you don't have to put outlines around everything. This just makes things unnecessarily big and cluttered. As you can see in the example, I didn't put outlines around the necklace, the belt buckle, the flower and the strap of the shoulder bag.

I hope this tutorial was helpful in any way. Have fun making tiny dolls!